Another observation: participles loving, winning, and losing have superlatives but not comparatives: The Canandian women's ice hockey team was the winningest in the Olympics, even winninger than the Americans.

Dick


On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Webmail bdespain <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Just some more observations. 
 
There is a certain phonetic similarity about the two-syllable words that attract the -est suffix:  they seem to end in an unstressed vowel or sonnant, e.g., able, clever, common, feeble, gentle, narrow, shallow, simple.  Some single-syllables that end in -ng make the g hard, e.g., long (longest), strong (strongest).  The fact that the adjective forming -ing does not seem to do this suggests a separate allophone or morphophonemic rule.  Also the -y adjectives that attract -est can often have another syllable added to the front, as, unhappiest, untidiest.  This does not seem to be the same for loving or winning: *"the unlovingest disciple", ?"the unwinningest team this season." 
 
Bruce
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